But Cat has vanished too. She is not in the back of the shop, she is not at the mango tree. When he pelts down the street to her old house, he thinks he sees her on the veranda and he crashes through the hole in the fence, through the waist-high grass, sobbing, calling to her.
He hears police sirens. A car pulls up at the gate and Charlie leaps over the side railing of the veranda and races along the backs of the houses to the shop. He has a mad hope that she will be waiting in the sleep out for him, or up in the mango tree, but she is not.
“Who called the police?” he asks his parents.
Ah who?
The Courier-Mail said she eluded capture for two days.
A pernicious and total lack of respect for authority, the police said. The way she clawed them upon recapture, more like an animal than a young woman. Beyond reform, they said.
Triage
School magazine photograph. Two debating teams. In school blazers, side by side in front row, the two captains, one with prefect’s crest on pocket. Night of the intramural debate.
Topic: TRIAGE — that in times of crisis or natural disaster, it is legitimate, in the interests of a stable society (whether macro or micro) and for the greater good of the majority, for the authorities to establish a system of priorities; that is, it is legitimate to ask, If all cannot be saved, who then should be saved?
Team arguing in affirmative captained by Robinson Gray.
Team arguing in opposition captained by Charles Chang.
Statement of Headmaster acting as judge: Though both teams advanced powerful and well-argued cases, reason wins over passion. Successfully argued by Robinson Gray that the ability to be intelligently “cruel” when the occasion demands is the hallmark of enduring civilisations. Award given to affirmative team.
Lost and Found
This photograph, taken in a bathhouse or in the locker room of some school swimming pool, shows two adolescent boys, naked, their backs to the camera, towelling themselves. Their school uniforms hang from pegs on the wall. Small duffle bags are visible near their feet, tucked under the wooden bench that presumably runs the length of the room.
The title of this photograph, printed neatly on the back, would not make sense except for something Charlie once told me.
I always had to remember, he said, at Grammar, to take off the chain with Cat’s earrings before swimming lessons. (These were compulsory, twice a week.) You know what would happen to a boy seen with a necklace on, he said.
But he hated to take the chain off. He had such primitive, intense, superstitious feelings about Cat’s earrings. He needed to feel them against his skin. So he used to wait until he got into the locker room, and then he would remove the chain quickly and surreptitiously, before he took off his shirt. He used to slip the chain into the pocket of his pants and then remove the pants and hang them on the peg.
Once he forgot.
He was in his swimsuit, under the obligatory shower, about to walk outside to the pool.
“Hey Chang, you sissy!” someone yelled. “Is that from your girlfriend or your mummy?”
Charlie felt instant fever. He turned to face them, stepping out from the shower. “It was a dare,” he said lightly, his survivor’s instincts racing. “I had to keep it on till someone noticed. Thought you were all bloody blind.”
But he saw the way Robbie, very close to him, stared at the gold rings and their tiny blue beads. He thought Robbie was going to strike him. He saw that mad red-eyed look come and go, the look he associated with Cat’s veranda and spiders and shit.
Robbie turned away. “Wouldn’t have picked Chang for a queer,” he said.
Everyone laughed.
Charlie yanked the chain from his neck, breaking it, and walked back up the locker room and stuffed his shameful bit of Woolworths jewellery into his duffle bag.
He didn’t dare look at it after the swimming lesson, but at the end of the day, when he got home, it was gone.
He felt so ill, he was unable to sleep. He crept from the sleepout and spent the night sitting under the mango tree, his back against the spot on the tree trunk where Cat had leaned on that long gone night.
Two days later, after the next swimming lesson, the chain and its earrings reappeared in his duffle bag.
After that, he was more careful. On swimming days, he left the chain at home in his underwear drawer.
The Black Pussycat
Snapshot of sleazy nightclub in lower George Street in Brisbane, a notorious place of ill repute. To call a spade a spade, it was a cathouse.
Ah, how legends billow from the photograph.
Once upon a time a woman of enchantments walked the catwalks of the night. When she moved, men swayed as the grass sways for the wind. She wore seven veils of silence and perhaps for that very reason, by some instinctive urge toward balance, men were particularly noisy when she appeared — though the sounds they made were not the sounds of rational discourse.
Was she beautiful? This was passing strange. All the evidence indicates that she was very far indeed from being beautiful. She was not even pretty. In fact, patrons would say in a puzzled kind of way, if you had to find a single word, ugly would be closer to the mark. There was something scrawny about her, something that made you think of an alley cat, something quite remote from beauty, something feral and sinuous, something that stretched itself toward you, green eyes glittering, until your skin began to catch fire and your body began to purr and you began to smell the sharp primitive musk of your underwear and your secret desires. You began to want her, you began to feel convinced that she was keeper of some powerful secret, you believed she was luring you, compelling you, you began to move toward her as Cat’s move, motion flowing like a slow spill of perfumed oil from brain to nerve.
Yes, she was quite ugly really. She had short spiky hair, feral eyes, hollowed cheeks, small breasts, the body of a wild underfed boy. She looked frail and tiny but she was a wafer of dynamite and she held men in thrall. Under the enchantment of her Circe eye, they were turned into swine and they certainly behaved like pigs. Though she was under a curse of silence, it was rumoured that her tongue could speak the whole of the Kama Sutra and every item in the Kinsey Report. Men had wet dreams and blew a week’s wages on a tonguelashing from the witch at the Pussycat.
Did she dance? Ah, when she danced, men saw fire as they had seen it the first time, when Prometheus filched it from the gods. It flickered with defiance and pain, it tantalised, it licked at their hopes.
She lived by theft and by enchantment, it was said. At night, you might see her moving like a possum from roof to roof, a cat burglar against the moon. She would slide noiselessly through the openings in your house and make off with your valuables and set up camp in your sleep. Once her eyes fell upon you, you were marked. You would never be free. You would feel compelled to put your sign on her, oh and men did, they felt challenged. You cannot make her cry out in pain, it was said, and there were those who went to unusual lengths to verify the truth of this claim. Who could resist?
Yes, she was certainly ugly. There were many scars on her arms and legs and on other more intimate stretches of her skin: cigarette burns, razor blade scars, the marks of whips. Some of the slashes she had administered to herself with rusty razor blades or broken beer bottle necks.
“You do it when you need to scream but you can’t,” another self-slasher from the Holy Family School for Little Wanderers told Truth. “It doesn’t hurt when you’re doin’ it. You don’t feel nothin’. You don’t notice it. You’re just tryin’ to cut away all this other pain, see? It’s like pus, and you’re tryin’ to let it out.”
This is the kind of sensational thing the tabloid newspapers print. It’s in very bad taste. Respectable people avert their eyes, and rightly so. Let us return to modesty and social decorum, they say, for these are the proper hallmarks of our time, and of civilisation, that delicate flowering tree. Let us return to lapdogs, let us examine the Angst of the dinner party, the distressing intimati
ons of the tap-tap-tapping of the quarry’s tunnels beneath mahogany sideboards and against the undersides of pillowcases of pure combed cotton, handkerchief-fine; let us consider the disturbance of a shiver passing through the frail stemmed crystal, the exquisite prose of lamentation for the falling off in the quality of wines. These are the modest details of our lives — of the lives that count — and therefore let us read only of such matters, let us have a literature that is unassertive, limpid, economical, and lean. Let those with gothic taste and vulgar memories keep a proper silence, please.
And rightly so.
The woman of the catwalks, the alley cat dancer, is not the stuff of literature. There is something far too excessive about her. Let her keep silence. Let those who would speak of her silence keep silence too.
Let us turn instead to those who discuss Chekhov and Irigaray over wine.
For Cat was ugly and vulgar and absolutely non-literary, and ideologically she was definitely unsound.
She was a dangerous woman, but a challenge. How men loved it, how intoxicated they became, when she silently fought and scratched. On dirty beds, they wrestled with their turbulent fantasies, they dreamed of belling the cat, they had visions of breaking the unbroken colt and taming the shrew.
This is the sort of trashy fantasy that is reported in tabloid newspapers.
Odysseus on the Island of Circe
Newspaper clipping on white card. The title, Odysseus … etc., printed beneath in Charlie’s hand. Photo credit: Truth.
What is truth? asked a smiling judge.
Truth was a tabloid newspaper in Brisbane, Your Honour. It was not read by respectable people, and rightly so.
What does the photograph show? It shows the frontage of the infamous Black Pussycat in George Street. Through the large picture window the bar can be seen, and along the bar the fuzzy line-up of the backs of a number of men. Some are wearing suits, some are in working-class shirts. One can safely assume that the men are ogling the scantily clad woman who walks along the top of the bar.
Newspaper caption: BACK TO BASICS. Does Brisbane know where respectability and prestige go on their odd night off?
In Charlie’s handwriting: When men act like pigs it is entirely the fault of Circe, naturally. But Odysseus draws his sword and sticks it in Circe’s mouth, and lo, he may leave unscathed.
Sheba
It could be at The Shamrock in Brisbane, it could be later at Charlie’s Place. Whichever. She worked in both joints. Golden in the light that streams through stained-glass Four-X and Swan Lager signs, the Queen of Sheba presides over the bar with a languid contentment that has been known, on occasion, to break into runnels of flame the way a bushfire does. Then her anger will lick and scorch. A few quick sparks of contempt for the great cloud of unknowing that hovers above the comfortable, above those who live at very safe removes from nether worlds, a few sparks, and whoosh, her disdain may leap out of control.
Mostly, however, Sheba accepts the world as it is, and deploys her energies in its many pleasures, and sets her compass for survival. That is why she says to Lucy: “Your boyfriend’s gonna get himself killed.”
Ah. The Shamrock. In Brisbane still. “He’s making a lot of people very jumpy,” she says. “Taking pictures, keeping records like that, asking too many questions. You just don’t do that sorta thing around Brisbane.”
“I thought that’s what you were after, Sheba, when you first put your hex on me. Someone to shake things up. Wave a white wand.”
“Fat chance,” Sheba says. “Daydreams. I just didn’t forgive ya for thinkin’ ya lived in outer space, that’s all. For thinking you could keep your starched white petticoat clean. I know, see, the way the clean world and the dirty world mix. They mix every day on Brunswick Street and every night. It’s the clean world that keeps the dirty world going. So it just makes me want to chuck up when clean people try so hard not to know about that.”
“You should be happy about what Gabriel’s doing then,” Lucy contends. “Keeping a file on all those Mr Cleans.”
“There’s ways and ways,” Sheba says. “He’s just gonna get himself killed.”
But she drapes her warning around Lucy lightly as a streamer and moves along the bar and between the tables in the lounge, a ministering angel. Above her head, poised aloft on the wing of her graceful arm, circular trays laden with jugs of ale and glasses float across the top of the crowd. Sheba love, the men say, patting her generous behind. Watch where you put your fingers, mate, she says, smacking them. Or they’ll get chopped off.
“Listen,” she says to Lucy, returning through cigarette smoke and laughs, “I got a bloke over there can’t keep his eyes off you. He’s quite the gentleman, plum in ’is mouth, loads of dough. One of me sugar daddies, as a matter of fact, comes up from Sydney like clockwork, on business I suppose but how would I know? and he wants his naughty on the side, and back ’e goes. He’s a dud fuck, bugger it, but aren’t they all? That’s why they come to me, innit?
“I’m fond of ’im,” she says. “He’s a gentle bloke with the usual blues, disappointed in love, he says. Well aren’t they all?
“It’s not fucking he wants from you, Lucy. He gets that from me,” she says. “He wants to buy you a drink, that’s all, he wants to talk. Well, that’s all he does when he’s paying, is talk the bloody leg off an iron pot.
“He’s got the hots for you, Lucy. I told him you had this dirty secret life at the university, studying and that, and it really got his engine going.” Sheba laughs. “I don’t mean he wants to race you, he just wants to talk. You gonna go for it?”
“Sure,” Lucy shrugs. “Why not?”
“That’s him over there by the window. He’s a bloody judge in Sydney, so mind your Ps and Qs. You can call him whatever you like, but I call him Sonny Blue.”
There is no photograph, except in Lucy’s mind, of the table at The Shamrock and the two glasses and the amber light that falls through the window onto Lucy and Sonny Blue. His Honour, Judge Sonny Blue.
They speak of this and that, of shoes and ships and sealing wax, of cabbages and kings, of the interesting ways in which the bonds of human kindness are both loosened and strengthened by a glass or two of Four-X beer, of the ways in which communitas becomes more elastic, more inclusive, more durable. They speak of the vibrancy of pubs as compared to the modes of community in law courts, say or in universities.
Live and let live, they agree. At least, as a general principle. Though of course there are certain things which are over the top and below the belt and out of bounds. One did have to draw lines, or where would society be? One drew lines, and one turned a blind eye: this was an instinctive corrective measure in all societies. Wonderfully complex, they agree, the social animal. Consider bees, Sonny Blue says. But neither of them knows enough about bees to pursue this analogy at length.
Consider the single-minded, Sonny Blue says. Consider the overly pure in heart. Consider the damage fanatic reformers have wrought: Cromwell, the French Revolution, the puritan witch hunts in New England, the Stalinist purges, the Red Guards, Islamic fundamentalists, the thought police. Both the inability to turn a blind eye, and the inability to draw straight lines when they had to be drawn — these lacunae were always present in the recurring dark ages of civilisation.
Yes, Lucy says. But how does one know when the lines must be drawn and where exactly …
It’s a matter of instinct, he says.
Yes, she says. But are not the people with the power to impose their particular lines more inclined to draw them for their personal benefit? Can we, in fact, ever trust them? Doesn’t the fact of power create an automatic conflict of interest?
Ah, he says sadly. I sense a streak of destructive bitterness. We inherit the lines, you see, they are sanctioned by time. We inherit the instinct for when it is appropriate to turn a blind eye. It is tradition, and respect for tradition, that makes the web of civilisation. And it is the bitter zeal of those who want to redraw the lines which destroys.
I see, Lucy says.
Consider, he says sorrowfully, the zealous son of a colleague of mine. He’s breaking his father’s heart. His father asks me to keep an eye on him when I’m in Brisbane.
Why is he breaking his father’s heart? Lucy asks.
He’s trying to redraw the lines, Sonny Blue says. He doesn’t know when to turn a blind eye.
Such sadness clouds Sonny Blue’s eyes, such pain comes off the clenched knuckles on the beer glass, that Lucy impulsively leans across the table and puts her hand on his. She has a disturbing visionary flash: his eyes are not eyes, but deep black wells, they are cavernous scarred openings like quarry pits. She puts this vision down to the third beer.
(Even from this distance, I told Catherine, knowing what I now know, I would maintain that his pain was intense, and it was real.
Yes, Catherine said. But the question is, what was the nature of the pain?)
Sonny Blue sighs. The young won’t listen, he says sadly. I feel my colleague’s pain as if it were my own. The young are so arrogant, he says. So unforgiving. Gabriel, for example, won’t even speak to his father. It’s breaking his father’s heart.
Gabriel? Lucy asks, startled.
The son of my colleague, Sonny Blue says. You know him?
Lucy shrugs. Weird name, that’s all. We meet too many blokes to remember who’s who in here.
I suppose, Sonny Blue says. Yes, I suppose, with so many men. You should keep a lookout though. This is just the sort of place Gabriel hooks onto, and you’re just the type he makes use of. Quite ruthless about it in his own zealous way. His father — my colleague, that is — is left picking up the legal pieces for him.
How exactly do you mean? Lucy asks.
Oh well, the judge says, gesturing with his hand in a manner that suggests sub judice taboos. Let’s not … a long history, that’s all. A certain kind of puritan zeal. A very pure sort of callousness, one might perhaps say, or a righteous ruthlessness. You know the sort of thing. (Sonny Blue implies courteously, world-wearily, that he and Lucy are all too familiar with …) You know, the old pattern of cosying up to barmaids and prostitutes, using them for information, until, well, you know, then dropping them like hot cakes, and then …
The Last Magician Page 25
